Rock Lake

I saw Rock Lake today
It was covered with ice

I saw the island we touched on
It was covered with snow

Where did that summer go?
And all the ones since?

Excavator

I am an excavator of memories
Transforming them into words
To fill blank pages 

Writing

I like writing 
In dimly lit bars
Alone
To cleanse my soul
When it is raining
When the words come
In coffee shops with good hot coffee
In places of mystery and inspiration
In places of silence and solitude
When I am deep inside myself
When the sun comes out
Sitting by water
Making poetic memories
When I am at peace
I like writing 

Time

 

I believe
I am beginning

To grasp

What happened between us

Or 

What didn't happen

In the end 
Are the two not the same?

 

Dislocation

“There is a moment before impact that is the last instant of things as they are. Then the visible
 world explodes.”  
~ Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo

Thin lines
Entwined together 
A rope of life
Over and over 
Thicker and thicker
Layer upon layer 
Of familiarity 
Of knowing
Of being comfortable together
Sedimentary rock formations 
Formed together 
Over time
Over space
Naturally
Without thinking life merges and forms
Within the seconds of normalcy
In a moment 
It all dislocates
An emotional explosion
Rips and shreds the rope
Crumbles and shakes the rock
Nothing intact 
Nothing protected 
Debris strewn over the landscape of an existence
What would of been tomorrow
Ceases today
In the space between then and now

 

Blue

She danced 
In a short blue dress
Legs as long as the palm trees 
Swaying 
In the warm breeze
While her auburn hair 
Shimmered
In the moonlight 

Hemingway and Atwood

 "He had been successful in almost every way except in his married life, although he had never cared, truly, about success. What he cared about was painting and his children and he was still in love the first woman he had been in love with. He had loved many women since and sometimes someone would come to stay on the island. He needed to see women and they were welcome for a while. He liked having them there, sometimes for quite a long time. But in the end he was always glad when they were gone, even when he was very fond of them. He had trained himself not to quarrel with women anymore and he had learned how not to get married."
~ Ernest Hemingway, Islands In The Stream

"So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with. That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what."
~ Margaret Atwood

Kay

Wherever I go
Wherever I have gone 
Wherever I will go
I will
Carry you with me...

 

Racing In The Street

Words so haunting
So universal 
Words interchangeable  
With the vagary of existence 

Experiences
 
So long ago
So far away
Where has everything gone
That was and is and is not anymore


"Fundamentally we're repairmen. Everybody's broken. Everybody's broken somewhere. You can't get through life without it. You've paid your artists and your film makers and your poets and your novelists to be basically your handyman or your repairmen. And we're willing to go into the garage, where all the junk is lying around, and we start to tinker away. When you contextualize and make small sense of those things, they start to repair those little pieces of you."
- Bruce Springsteen, HBO Documentary High Hopes

After

Is God speaking?
Whispering the answers

  (for resurrection)
   (for restoration)

Only after
The questions are no longer asked?

After time
After pain
After storms
After vertigo
After silence
After tears 
After darkness
After confusion
After undiluted slog
After liminal space
After being ship wrecked and broken

After it all
Now 
The rainbow of release

One Word

(Say Something - A Great Big World & Christina Aguilera)



I am looking for answers I am afraid to find 
To questions I am afraid to ask
Searching for an explanation
Searching for one word

Yes...one word

One word to explain everything
One word to bring clarity
Is your name the one word 
Is your mothers name the one word

Is the word
Is any word 
Merely a mask
A veil of letters
 
I am running now after nothing
Into the night that ends
And begins and ends and begins

Yes...into it I run 

Flailing my arms
Lungs burning
Mind racing
One word
 
Where is it
Where are you

Leaving always leaving
People leave like trains or planes
Your heart expands for a lover
Expands and contracts
You bleed for her love
You search for one word to make her stay

One word again
The bloody evasive one word
There is no word to make anyone stay

So she goes

And the wind blows 
Through leafless trees
Creaking in its laughter

The word is in a rain drop
But which one
There are so many rain drops
No way to look into them all

Will you help
Oh...you are gone already

I sit alone 
In the forest
In the city
On a street corner
On a log by a stream

Scenery changes

But not I

I was searching
While your hand slipped out of mine
Before I could kiss you
Before I could make love to you
Maybe in making love 

The word
The one word

Would be uttered
A sacred word 
A tantric word
To free spirits in the night
Trapped in their own freedom

Not free
Never free

For the word is never spoken
Not even between lovers
Masquerading as truth 
Lust lifts lost souls out of the mire
Only to be lost again
And again and again

This is no noble quest
This is a fantasy in search of meaning
In search of a word
In search of an interpreter
A sanguine metaphor
Folly and vanity 
Vanity and folly

We pretend and act and parade 
We play house and then betray ourselves
Leaving our damaged images behind
Collateral damage of our insatiable passions

To wonder why 
To wonder how
To search for the one word

The one word

To make sense of their fractured lives
So where are you
So far from me
So distant
In the past and forgotten
A dream from two nights ago
A dream I forgot
As soon as I woke up
The sun bleaching my memory

No artifact
No fossil
No fragment of our time

The moments stretched into years
Forgotten in a garbage dump of fears
A wasteland of consequence
An aborted rendezvous 
What word could have I sputtered 

What word
What word
What one word
 
If I screamed it
Whispered it
Wrote it
Sang it

No

No word stands against vile actions
Recriminations and resentments stacked and counted before bed
Kindling for fire fights
Napalm induced rage
Scorching our bodies 
I want you to stay my love
My new love
The love I am afraid of
(I am afraid of any love now)
The scars healed over
The scabs no longer picked at
Calloused and cold are my veins
I barely feel myself anymore

I am numb

I am drowning in myself
Suffocating on the very elixirs which are to make me okay
Downing my white oblong friends each morning

So I can sit 

Without pondering Camus's question
Hamlet's soliloquy 
Alphabet soup 
Words and words and words

Ah Macbeth perhaps
All sound and fury 
Ah yes - sound and fury
Signifying what
What indeed
 
Nothing
Nothing 
Nothing

We look and search and quest
With Don Quixote
Battling ferocious monsters
Only to be told 
Windmills are innocuous  
Seeing a mirage 
For nothing doesn't cast a shadow 
Only broken hearts do 
In the noon day sun

One word
One word
One word

 

Bukowski Days & Rejuvenation...

 

Dream...

Dream...
Of the beauty of humanity fully alive
Together in a sea of belonging

Dream...
Of life larger, grander and exquisite 
All more so than we ever allowed our imaginations to believe

Dream...
Of being unmanaged, uncontrolled and unequal in possibility
The fusion of horizons 

Dream...
Of creating unfettered
Abundant in spirit, passion and love

Dream...  

 

Will You?

Will you confiscate me?

In the night
While a star falls into the sea

In the desert 
While the sun breaks over the horizon

(While our hearts are beating in the silence)

In the oasis
While the droplets of dew roll over our skin

In my bed
While you are wrapped around me

Will you confiscate me?
 

Soft

 

(Sunday Afternoon ~ Two Harbors)

I am scared
I tremble

(Get weak and sigh)

In absence
There is presence
A gentle softness 

(To settle)

My lost soul

 

The Emptying...

(Pacem In Terris)

I want to make love to 
Your mind

I want to warm my body with
Your imagination

Exploring all the parts of your truth
Entering your thoughts
Mimicking the churning sea
With echoing memories 
Ecstatic swirling ideas

Until

We are emptied into each other
One being in creative energy

Only quieted
By the climax
Of our

Art 

 

Within A Story

 

Paris Cafe ~ 2011

 

 

We are living within a story we are not responsible for

Within the story

We create

We act

We are and we become

We are being

In being we think

In thinking we are aware

We choose our lines

Our lines are ours

(Our responsibility - inclusion and omission)

In our time

In the story

Our lines ripple

Bleeding and bouncing and bifurcating

Ink stains on blank pages

Lines into lines

Lines upon lines

Lines within lines

We are living within a story we are not responsible for

 

How To Keep Going by Caitlyn Siehl

(Internet Sourced & Edited)

Make sure you own a nice bed.

Sleep in it frequently.

Remember how nice it feels to flip over your pillow to the cooler side.

Check your pulse and hum along to the rhythm because it is music.

Write clear and make a lot of spelling errors. Get the poison out and don’t worry about it being neat.

If you can, do not shut people out. You will have good days and they should see them.

If you feel overwhelmed, go outside and scream. Find a nice empty park in the middle of the 
night and scream as loud as you can until your throat is bleeding. The world wants to hear you.

Let yourself fall in love. Believe it or not, there are people out there who want your blacks 
and blues.

Keep waking up.


Keep waking up.


Keep waking up. Maybe with someone next to you.

 

Rain In The Lies

  

I am in love with beginnings

       apprehensive of middles

       frightened of endings

       in liminal space

I am dreaming old dreams

        waking to empty drinks

        the smell of gin

        the taste of red wine

I am paying the cost

        to the piper in my head

        the loan shark in my heart

        the pauper in my soul

I am traveling on a cold night

        on the backs of giants

        in empty rail cars

        on soles covered with mud

I am still alive

        i feel the blood in my veins

        i hear the ache in the words

        i smell the rain in the lies

 

Prophets, Poets, Voices and Songs...

This evening as I was looking at my newsfeed on Facebook I noticed my friend Cathleen Falsani Possley posted a link with words from Leonard Sweet and she suggested reading all of Leonard's words before reading the article.

This is what he wrote:

I just found out Pete Seeger died yesterday. Is there a church in the US that hasn't heard these Seeger songs sung in its sanctuary? "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," "Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)" and "If I Had a Hammer." Back in 2006 Eugene Peterson was interviewed about his friendship with Bono, but spent a great deal of the time talking about Pete Seeger's impact on his life and faith. When asked, "Have any popular musicians acted as prophets in your life?" he replied: "Probably the most pervasive one in my life is Pete Seeger. I think he's a prophet. I very much doubt whether he would call himself a Christian, but he spoke truth and called attention to the things the Christian faith is committed to in a way that nobody else could do during his time."

When asked what Seeger "called attention to," Peterson responded, "Social justice issues, economic things, racial issues, peace....But he was doing this, and continues to do it -- he's done it all his life -- not in ways that the Christian church wasn't doing it, but he was getting the ear of people who would never go to church, and maybe of a lot of those who do go to church because they hadn't heard it from their own pulpits."

Seeger coined a phrase: "Bible Libel." It described those who profess to live by the Bible, but whose lives libel their lips. I thank God today for Pete Seeger, and his celebration of the common life, the common good, and the common people.

And then he posted this link: http://www.atu2.com/news/bonos-prophetic-vox.html which speaks to the prophetic voice of musicians with thoughts from Eugene Peterson and Walter Bruegermann.

Much in this article I believe is germane to the conversation about prophets and the prophetic voice today and it cemented in my mind the place and significance of the prophetic voice in music - in Pete Seeger, Bono (U2) and Bruce Springsteen.

Bruce Springsteen before singing his song, The Ghost of Tom Joad (the character taken from Steinbeck's, Grapes of Wrath) on Seeger's 90th birthday said this, "At age 90, he remains a stealth dagger through the heart of our country's illusions about itself. Pete Seeger still sings all the verses all the time, and he reminds us of our immense failures as well as shining a light toward our better angels and the horizon where the country we've imagined and hold dear we hope awaits us."

Here is the full introduction:

 

And here is The Ghost of Tom Joad performance:

 

In the article, Bono's Prophetic Vox (http://www.atu2.com/news/bonos-prophetic-vox.html) Scott Calhoun writes, "The appreciation goes both ways, Peterson said. He's thankful for U2's remarkable work of spreading a message, calling people to forsake lives of selfish pursuits fueled by destructive delusions. In U2's songs, he hears the sound of truth and love. Peterson can hear, when Bono sings, the voice of the prophet in pop culture."

He continues:

In the foreword to Raewynne J. Whiteley and Beth Maynard's, Get Up Off Your Knees, Preaching the U2 Catalog, Peterson wrote:

"Is U2 a prophetic voice? I rather think so. And many of my friends think so. If they do not explicitly proclaim the Kingdom, they certainly prepare the way for that proclamation in much the same way that John the Baptist prepared the way for the kerygma of Jesus...Amos crafted poems, Jeremiah wept sermons, Isaiah alternately rebuked and comforted, Ezekiel did street theater. U2 writes songs and goes on tour, singing them."

Eugene Peterson comments:

Well, I don't know the world of rock and roll music at all, but songs like "Peace on Earth" and "Yahweh," I can't believe they could anticipate that people would like those songs. [The lyrics] are words that I use in the pulpit and classroom, not the common vocabulary of the extra-church crowd. But they are used in such a way, said and sung, so that their meaning is conveyed in a way that reveals their truth: they commune and not just communicate, they evoke a responsive intimacy that can't be extracted from a dictionary. This is what art does, it gets beneath or within essential aspects of our lives.

Peterson then quotes Brueggeman, "So I've used the word prophet for them. Walter Brueggemann describes prophets as uncredentialed spokesmen for God. Well, I think that fits them pretty well. They don't have any authority in the world of faith."

I believe the same could be said for Seeger and Springsteen. Their lyrics are infused with biblical imagery, creatively re-authoring, interpreting, imagining and remembering while energized with authenticity and commitment.

Again Peterson,

Maybe we shouldn't even be asking prophets questions. They are asking questions of us. Maybe the question we ask should be, "Is God using these words, this stance, to say something to me, to my society, to my neighborhood?" A prophet, almost by definition, doesn't fit into the categories you expect, which is what gives them bite, and clarity, and the sense of grabbing us by the scruff of our neck, and saying, "Listen to this: this is truth, this is what's going on." The whole authority of prophets comes not from what people say about them or the credentials that they have, it's from the truth of what they are saying. This is true of the Biblical prophets and of prophetic voices all through history. Often prophets use the name God but sometimes they don't. It is interesting to reflect that no Hebrew prophet ever was referred to as "messiah," but the pagan Persian king Cyrus was. God used him in what I would refer to as a prophetic way to free the Hebrews from their exile and return them to their homeland, but Cyrus had no idea that he was issuing edicts under the sovereignty of God. It is my job as a pastor and professor to speak the name of Jesus and proclaim the news of the gospel into whatever reality the prophets expose and call attention to. If they also do it, that's fine, but if they don't that doesn't mean that they aren't speaking/acting on God's behalf.

This I think is great by Peterson:

Prophets don't have anything that Christ hasn't given them. Some of them find a vocation that is apart from the visible Church, maybe by accident or maybe deliberately or maybe not intentionally. But they are following the Spirit in some unarticulated way.

Sometimes I think God has to find a person who isn't carrying a lot of baggage or bad religion with them. John the Baptist, for example, where did he come from? He didn't fit the categories of the first century. And that happens over and over and over again. Simone Weil, the French woman who sometimes called herself an atheist, was a very prophetic voice in a time when prophetic voices were very rare in France.

 

I believe there is a lot going on here and God moves how she wants to move and does what she wants to do and speaks in ways she wants to speak. I haven't processed all this or formulated the words to articulate what I think all this means. It will take more thinking, meditating, silence and poetry.

 

U2 performing Yahweh and 40 (lyrics from Psalm 40):